Love God.

Jan 27

“Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one. Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength.” (Deuteronomy 6:4-5).

As we continue a series on the Shema (Sh’ma) found in Deuteronomy 6, let’s take a moment to talk about what loving God means.

Love God. Sounds easy, but boy, the word “love” is loaded. The word is so complicated that in Greek the word “love” has eight translations; One for familial love, one for obsessive love, one for sexual love, one for self love, one for playful love, one for brotherly love, and even one for obligatory love. But the Greek word that stands above there rest is the word used for “love” when Jesus quotes Deuteronomy 4:5 in Matthew 22.

Hearing that Jesus had silenced the Sadducees, the Pharisees got together. One of them, an expert in the law, tested him with this question: “Teacher, which is the greatest commandment in the Law?”

Jesus replied: “‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.’ 38 This is the first and greatest commandment..." (Matthew 22:34-38)

When love is used in this verse, the translation is agape love. Agape love is associated with the love of Christians and God’s love. This word for love includes an unconditional, sacrificial love that is given without anticipation or expectation for reciprocation. Jesus, when confronted by those who despised Him and were trying to tear him down, told them that to love God with all of themselves was the most important thing. Jesus did not appease them by telling them the greatest commandment was to be an expert in the law or to be righteous with God. His response points to the need for a deep, intimate relationship with God. The impact of our love for God will result in our understanding of how He wants us to live and desire to be right with Him, but the greatest commandment is to love God.

Over the next several weeks we will look at what it looks like to love God with our heart, with our soul and with our minds, but first, I wanted to focus on how this command is first about loving God. But why would this be the first commandment?

God wants us to love Him for many reasons. As our Creator, He knows that we were built for love, to offer love to others and to receive love. He was intentional to form our brains with the capacity to truly love, but He also knew that the brokenness of the world also results in fractured, distorted things disguised or twisted with love. He knew this would leave us with a complicated result. It makes sense that loving others and receiving love is difficult for us.

For me personally, the latter, receiving love, seems to be making headway as most difficult in my current season of life. What is interesting about the struggle to receive God’s love is how easy it is to say or think, but how tricky it is to actually believe. I can look to others and see they are worthy of this kind of love, but as my relationships with my friends, husband, and kids get deeper over time, I have a hard time conceptually processing that God loves me that way. His flawless, unconditional love that feels impossible to accept is real, but that is what makes it so impossible to hold.

If you continue reading Matthew 22, you will see the second commandment is: love your neighbor as yourself. This has two components. It assumes you love yourself, which is true because we fed and clothe ourselves and seek our own desires. However, our healthy self-love and appreciation is either over fed or starved. When overfed, we become self-obsessed, fame seeking, power or control hungry messes. The ironic peice is that when our self-love is bottled up or refused to be nurtured that we avoid our own needs and first look to others we get similar results. Many have learned or taught to believe that advocating for their needs is bad. Here, Jesus is not asking us to hate or loathe ourselves, but to love God first and then to love others. He wants us to focus on loving God and others, not on anything else.

The second component is to love your neighbor, or other people, as you love yourself, but why does loving God and loving others matter so much?

At times we can get so lost in the gospel that we forget what it is. As a friend and I were trying to unfold the truth of God’s love with fresh eyes, we were brought to tears. We took turns reading truths in scripture and noticed the pieces of God’s heart that often get lost. Our tears came in waves as we recognized how at times watered down truths, circumstances of life, and our pleasure-driven culture often distort or oversimplify the beauty of truth. In the process of our discussion, I wrote down a philosophy of discipleship, the process of walking with others to understand and know God. I wrote “Discipleship = to practice giving and receiving love so we let God love us.”

Notice how Jesus includes loving God and loving others as naturally related to one another when you read the passage together.

Hearing that Jesus had silenced the Sadducees, the Pharisees got together. One of them, an expert in the law, tested him with this question: “Teacher, which is the greatest commandment in the Law?”

Jesus replied: “‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.’ This is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like it: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’ All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments.” (Matthew 22:34-40)

When I read these verses in preparation to discuss God’s love, I suddenly was out of breath. As my breath quickened, I felt my heart race, and it was like a series of gears inside my brain allowed pieces of love assemble into a beautiful mosaic of truth in the forefront of my mind. Even though I had read this verse countless times, this moment left me with a fresh awareness and I heard God whisper: Love me by letting others love you. It brought me back to that moment of clarity about discipleship and I was, again, emotionally moved by remembering the beauty of the gospel by seeing how simple and complicated it is all at once.

Our God doesn’t love us because of what we do or who others think we are. He loves us simply because we are His. The gift of being in relationships that allow us to sit in awareness of God’s heart and align us with Him are precious and should be treasured. This is why God wants us to first love Him and then love others as best as we know how.

When we love God and then love others because He loves them, we also get to see how much God loves us. In relationships with others who are devoted to scripture, understanding God’s love for them, and truly pursuing loving God with their whole selves allows us to see Him with more clarity and gratitude. Other relationships that lack this depth help us understand our distance from fully comprehending how loved we are.

My prayer is that as you would also be emotionally moved by the gospel: the truth that God loves you in your imperfection, brokenness, and mess. He is not deterred by who you are, but knows all that you are capable of, yet delights in you. The thing He wants more than anything else is to see you become aware of how worthy you are of being loved. You get to love the One who loves you most, if you would like to, He’s with you.

May you continue to grapple with the love of God and attempt to conclude that it’s not too good to be true; He is that good.